Quezi

Hindu perpetual calendar (photo by eliazar - CC-BY)

Everyone probably remembers the Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme learned in grade school to help you remember the number of days in a month.

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
February has twenty-eight alone,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting leap-year, that’s the time
When February’s days are twenty-nine.

Three years out of every four, a year has 365 days in it – a common year. In the fourth year, there are 366 days – a leap year.  An extra day is added to the end of the month of February, so instead of having 28 days there are 29 days.  This extra day is called an intercalary day or a leap day.

The reason leap years are necessary is because the actual length of a year is not exactly days 365 days. Our planet takes a little longer than our calendar year to travel around the sun.  Our year of 365.2425 days, is only off from our solar year by .00031, which amounts to only one day’s error after 4,000 years.

A leap day occurs in any year that is divisible by 4 but not divisible by 100 except when the year is divisible by 400. Century years were made leap years if they were divisible by 400. So, 2000 was a Leap Year, but 1900 was not.

LEAP YEAR FACTS

In the year 2000 many people believed that there would be two extra days in February thanks to an internet hoax.

The only double leap year in history took place in 1712 in Sweden

In Greece it is considered unlucky to marry during a leap year

The odds of being born on Leap Day are about 1,506 to one. There are about 200,000 people in the US and 4 million people in the world who were born on Leap Day.

A person born on a leap day is referred to as a “leapling”.  Some people celebrate their birthday on February 28 and some celebrate on March 1.

You can find a long list of famous people born on February 29 at  The Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies.

Leap Day is more likely to happen on a Monday or a Wednesday then on any other day of the week.

The Olympics, staged every four years, coincide with Leap Years.

Many cultures think nothing of a woman proposing marriage to a man.  But when the rules of courtship were a bit stricter, it was acceptable for a woman to ask the question “Will you marry me?” only one day every four years – on February 29.

The Leap Year Cocktail is a drink created by Harry Craddock for the leap year party celebrations at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1928.  The Leap Year Cocktail is rumored to be responsible for hundreds of proposals.

Here is how to make the Leap Year Cocktail:

2 fluid ounces gin
1/2 ounce Grand Marnier
1/2 ounce sweet vermouth
1/4 ounce fresh lemon juice
1 lemon twist, for garnish
Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail